First off I'll confess, I did cheat a little bit with this Neocron 2 newbie experience - this isn't the first time I've played it. I had a good old look around during their open beta (read 'Mass Free Trial') some months back, so was able to get on with things a bit quicker than most genuine newbies would. This was one of the reasons I've started with this particular title. So what did I think?

Three Good Things:

  • Atmosphere:

    Set in a post-apocalyptic 28th century, the impression of wandering the ruins of a shattered Earth is well executed and very immersive. Certainly many of the themes are things we've seen before elsewhere; the precincts of Plaza, Via Rossa and Pepper Park owe much to Bladerunner, but in a good way, and the neon and concrete claustrophobia, hover taxis and general ambience seem far more gritty than Anarchy Online's somewhat airy Omni-1. At the other end of the world, the shattered rusting Dome of York carries a poignant note of decay, dripping rust and ruin very reminiscent of Fallout. Outside of the cities, the theme is continued well in the various outposts and villages, stark concrete edifices amid the howling sands, all littered with rusting barrels and rotting boxes. Running around these various places definitely conveys a sense of being there that isn't so easy to achieve in MMORPG any more.

    The music itself does deserve a special mention. It's a kind of mournful ambient soundtrack, with a kind of Native American/Aboriginal feel to it in places, and seems to fit the surroundings extremely well, further reinforcing the game's general feel of loss and technological ruin. However, a bit of research showed that most of this music seems to have been dropped in wholesale from existing CDs, themselves worth a further look.

    Max Corbacho - Look for 'Vestiges' and 'Far Beyond The Imobile Point'

    Steve Roach - Look for 'Truth & Beauty: The Lost Pieces Volume Two'

    I could listen to those for hours, and do, as they install as MP3s in a subdirectory...

  • Droning:

    One character class is 'Rigger', which is basically a UAV Drone pilot. The pseudo-FPS model is fresh and interesting for all classes and weapons, but the whole game mechanic of Drone piloting absolutely gobsmacked me, and after that I didn't really want to be anything else. The Drone is a small spikey hovering robot, about the size of a basketball. There are a variety of models in the shops, each with different weapon options, operating ranges and performances. You equip one, find somewhere safe to hide, then launch it, at which point, you have an out-of-body experience, and effectively become the Drone. It flies a lot like you'd imagine 'real' space fighters would - long near-frictionless swoops, while gimbaling in place, allowing majestic and deadly fly-by shootings, and the whole experience put me a lot in mind of falconry, in some ways. It has downsides, of course - your vacant body ('Meatsack' in Rigger parlance) is totally defenceless, the drone itself explodes if it hits water, has a maximum operating range, and is incapable of looting the things it kills, as are you while flying it.

    The sheer novelty of it all enthralled me, and there is a real opportunity to develop and master skill in piloting them. Planetside has a camera-guided missiles which work in a similar manner, but the flight time is so short and the steering so cumbersome that the experience is not that comparable. Everquest's 'Eye of Zomm' spell is perhaps the nearest, which creates a floating eye you then inhabit and can steer down corridors to scout ahead, but again, very limited duration. What struck me was that for a 'Pet Class', the pet was in many cases, far more powerful than the owner. I'd recommend a go at the free trial purely for the Drones.

  • Trade Skills:

    A difficult one to comment on based purely on the limited, low-end experience I had with them, but the trade skill system seems to work quite well, and is essentially based on grubbing around in bins for scraps of broken technology to then feed into various devices, to produce new weapons, etc. Monster loot is needed, but not to the point that you have to be an uber-combat-guy before even starting on gunsmithing, etc. It fits very well with the world ethos, and generates xp, so is a whole-career viable play style. Most importantly, the majority of time spent is on finding the materials, rather than actually clicking ‘Combine’ over and over – more in the nature of scavenging, rather than mass-production.

Three Bad Things:

  • Bugs:

    While certainly much better than it's Beta test days, there are enough bugs still present to cause a minor but noticeable low-grade irritation, including encumbrance/run-speed problems, odd third-first person camera switching with drones, a very annoying 'dead on arrival' zoning issue, and most worrying of all, more than a few 'C++ Runtime Error' crash to desktop incidents. Also, server lag can be a problem sometimes.

  • PvP:

    As far as I could tell, the mid-end game of Neocron 2 seems based mostly around Factional Outpost Capture PvP, which is fine if you like that sort of thing, but as is usual in this case, PvE content tends to suffer. There is a PvP option toggle, a removable brain implant you start life with that opts-out of PvP altogether, but the toggle becomes a one-way permanent switch past level 30, and unless you go PvP-Enabled, you are barred form joining a player clan, and from taking part in many of the 'Epic' faction missions. The impression I got was that beyond about level 40 or so, you're kind of expected to be doing the PvP thing mostly anyway. I’m afraid I didn’t ‘test’ PvP, myself – call me a faggot if you like; it’s just not my thing, but at any rate, despite being pseudo-FPS twitch-based, PvP did seem to mostly be about ambush, numbers, buffs and equipment/stat choices – again, not my thing.

  • Players:

    Basically, the game is far too empty. During my time there, the server peaked at a cyptic ‘14%’ population, which I think means about 300 players, and mine was the busiest server on the list. This works well to deepen the ambience; the loneliness of a ruined world, a feeling of being one of the last people alive, but I’m not sure it does any favours for gameplay. On average I saw about ten people in one session, four hours or so, and that was a fair mix of city and wilderness. The most people I saw in one place was about 20, which in itself caused lag problems, and that was only after finding out and travelling to the main ‘hanging out’ zone, itself not easy to get to for the newer player.

    Turning off the ‘OOC’ and ‘HELP’ global channels could easily complete the impression that you were playing a single player game. Turning off the OOC channel is especially recommended, as it is more often than not filled with particularly nasty smacktalk. I’ve seen a few online games by now, and met some bad people in them, but the sheer ferocity of the average exchange on OOC even startled me somewhat. I thought it was because of the PvP, but then I’d never seen anything quite like that level of sustained ill-feeling in Planetside, arguably a harsher game for PvP.

    I’m not sure I agree with PC Zone guy, below about “to a man” - there are probably a lot of quite nice people in there, but I suspect they’re all in silent hiding as well. It doesn’t seem to take much to provoke a massively disproportionate and angry response from the more vocal OOC channel people though, so on the whole it’s best just to be quiet. Most worrying is the total lack of GM or CS Rep intervention or policing of these channels. While in theory, children shouldn’t be playing this game anyway, it’s still not that pleasant for adults either, and for most players these channels will be the only contact with other players they’ll have for hours at a time.

    I’m sure there’s an essay on ‘Are gamers a product of their game world?’ somewhere, but perhaps all these people are just roleplaying nasty people because it fits the shattered broken world? Regardless, something needs to be done if they don’t want people driven away by it, and issuing a press release to the effect that ‘pussies need not apply’ probably isn’t very helpful in the grand scheme of success and cashflow.

So overall? Well, I personally don’t think a numerical score is that helpful – a reviewer either likes it or doesn’t. I liked it and would probably have given it more than 24%, but could see very quickly that I’d get bored within a month, not having an interest in PvP. Exploration is good, but only lasts until you’ve seen it all, and the world wasn’t that big – I’d visited about 80% of it during this week and the fortnight of beta test, previously. I’d recommend a go at the free trial – it works well as a sort of 3D walkthrough postcard from the Future, but wouldn’t recommend staying, although I’ll admit many of my reasons for not staying are personal scepticisms, rather than objective flaws. At this stage, I would consider going back, but not for a long time, one week having provided my fill.

Final Verdict: Try, Don’t Buy.

(P.S. I did manage to buy the motorbike – the sheer rate of kills via Droning is much higher than I’d thought. The Motorbike itself turned out to be a bit disappointing in the end though. It looked like a bike from Akira, but sounded like a tractor, didn’t go as fast as I’d hoped, and since it doesn’t respawn with you if you get killed while on it, I spent more time hiking to find and recover it after dying, than actually riding it. Still, mission accomplished!)